"Oh," she realizes, "those of you who know each other could tell your friends their arias if you remember them, that should speed things up—" And she tries a couple of cursory tests and concludes, "The rock is a little porous by itself but the goo can seal it pretty good. I can hold pressure with it."

"For the Valor of humanity, all else shall fall behind the Eclipse," Casey says to Sylvia.

Sylvia gasps. "No. It's that easy?" She repeats the words, her voice echoing with resonance of the words, and her elegant red evening gown raiment kaleidoscopes out onto her body.

With a wide genuine smile, Sylvia gets Shaine's attention and quotes the lanky girl's aria at her, then does the same for Casey, before levitating over to Scyelen and quoting her aria as well. Shanie transforms immediately, jagged golden lace and white-silver chains that leave nothing to the imagination, but Casey knows better than to try with her body in such a gravid state.

Unfortunately, none of the other magical girls knew each other before all this (not even the pair who were making out earlier and are now clinging to each other in a tight cuddle), but this raises their spirits quite a bit, and they set to rediscovering their arias with a will.

...is no one going to quote the Scintillae's aria back at them? Seriously?

Scyelen has complicated and conflicted feelings about their rescuer, but failing to return that knowledge is just... doing it wrong. She isn't even sure what 'it' is, in this context, but.

Scyelen doesn't want to get up, so she crawls, slowly, and plops down at the nearest Scintilla's feet.

"Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough; I am Hollow Witch Scintilla," she says softly.

"...Thanks," she murmurs.

And she repeats the words, this time for real. They click together in her mind and trigger the transformation in her soul.

Her raiment, when it forms, is a flowing black robe or dress... at least at first glance. On a closer look, though, the cloth is patterned in a thousand rippling shades of midnight. Black and blue and green and purple, all so dark that in the low light of the cavern it's almost impossible to tell the different colours apart, and gleaming with a faint iridescence that further confuses the eye. On top of that base, a tracery of metallic blue embroidery sweeps in delicate curves, bringing to mind the movement of smoke or mist or water. Her swirling hems offer glimpses of matte black boots with glossy detailing and accents in that same pale metallic blue, shaped comfortably with a rounded toe and low practical heel. Under her slightly belled sleeves, her wrists and forearms are wrapped in black bracers whose pattern echoes the boots.

The transformation overtakes all her bodies at once, and in unison they take a deep breath and relax considerably. Then they arrange blobs of marbled red goo into accessories - fingerless gloves extending the bracers, or a thick film coating the boots. Slightly different for each instance, and always something that looks at least basically reasonable at a glance, an intentional addition rather than a slimy mess.

"Okay," she says, when it looks like those who are going to recover their arias immediately have managed it. "Where does this leave us in terms of resources?"

Sylvia takes charge. "Clear us a path, in the debris-fall. Enclose us all in something air-tight, sturdy, with a way to see out, and drop us. I will handle the rest."

"But rock splat!" one girl speaks up.

"Do we have a Stone Mage?" Sylvia asks.

The heavily gravid hispanic and curvy girl from before raises her hand. "Quakestrider. I've got a fissure spell. But I can't transform like this, my raiment'd cut me in half."

Sylvia nods. "Malevolent Mirror here will copy your spell and clear the way for us."

"It's touch-range..." Quakestrider points out.

"I have Environment," Sylvia says. "Mirror and I will ride on the outside of Scintilla's vehicle, and clear the way."

Wait, what.

"The only question that remains," Sylvia says, "is if we can do this before Scattered Moment's soul de-earths."

Sylvia pauses. "Scintilla. You can see how fast it is progressing, and you know best how quickly you can work. Can we do this before we lose her?"

"I think so. And I can leave some of me behind in case she doesn't make it."

The pillar of debris shivers slightly. The darker shade of four-dimensional goo spreads quickly through it, and then the whole thing sort of... withers, like cotton candy in hot steam. At the same time, a spherical shell forms on the lakeshore, and the goo walls excluding the men are rapidly consumed by the living goo spread across their surface. The shell is coated inside and out with glistening red slime, and has an opening near the bottom, and—she frowns slightly, and the nearest body to the shell ducks inside— "If you're riding on the outside do we still need windows? I think I can do them but it'll slow down construction a little. Unless somebody around here can make glass really fast."

Noncommittal muttering.

"If you trust me, no, it does not need to have windows," Sylvia says. "Skyburst, go explain what we're doing to the rest of the men."

Shanie goes and orates at the crowd of confused naked guys.

"Okay, then we can start loading now. I'll help anyone who has trouble moving on their own."

Some of the girls who couldn't fit into their raiments are still able to walk, but slowly, while others, like Casey and that Stone Mage can only drag themselves. It would probably be faster to just move everyone together.

Scyelen is definitely the last one still touching herself now. She hisses out her transformation aria, thankful at least that her raiment's absurd skimpiness is finally useful for something besides making her feel like a poseur; it covers so little that her belly doesn't get in the way of it at all. The tiny piece of pink metal between her legs folds into existence and separates her fingers from her vulva.

(The last of the sweltering urgency and throbbing receptiveness that she struggled to keep alive in her core slowly begins to fade away in the face of anxiety and pain and worry and failing not to think about what happens if they make it home. It feels like dying.)

Scyelen wipes away a tear and leaps over the crowd to Sylvia's side.

She starts getting everyone loaded, double-checks the cavern with lifesense, finds a couple of unconscious guys across the lake and drags them in on a tide of slime.

The interior of the sphere is big, and furnished with little covered seats people can tuck themselves into, lined up in rows along the walls; there's a variety of designs to accomodate different body types, pregnancy levels, and seating preferences. She's not sure how bumpy this ride is going to be, so she pulls in plenty of goo, keeping it mostly out of the way but ready to slide into place to cushion people against impacts if necessary.

(She keeps a little of the four-dimensional goo next to everyone with a pregnancy. If somebody's eldritch parasite gets jostled too hard and starts collapsing, she wants to at least have a shot at catching it before it kills them.)

She loads all but a few of herself into the vehicle, along with a bunch of unhatched eggs, and has most of her bodies line themselves up along the ceiling with the eggs and stick themselves in place with goo-rock. Some of her stay free in case they need mobility inside the shell, some of her stay behind in case they can't break out before Samantha's soul finishes detaching from her body, and one of her waits by the outside of the shell and says to Sylvia, "There should probably be one of me on the outside with you for communication purposes?"

"Perhaps. If you are willing to risk one of you to vacuum if I am distracted," Sylvia says, as she picks up Scyelen and levitates them both over the hole.

Three spells reach out and wrap around the goo vehicle. One can freely increase or decrease acceleration due to gravity. The second simply inverts the effects of gravity on the target. And the third spell skews the accelerations off-center, with diminishing returns as the skew approaches a right angle. With her mana capacity, these three spells combined allow arbitrary movement of very large objects.

The goo vehicle rises into the air and drifts out over the center of the hole.

Scintilla sticks herself to the outside of the shell, closes it up, and forms some exterior handholds in case Sylvia and/or Scyelen turn out to need them. She doesn't provide an entrance; she can just airlock people in and out by reshaping the shell as necessary, if they do land in vacuum once they're free.

"Can you make light?" Sylvia asks, glancing around at the floating lanterns that are their only current means of seeing.

"Not currently. And I don't think we have the time to experiment."

Sylvia spins herself and Scyelen upside down, and lands them on the underside (actually the front) of the goo vehicle.

"In that case, this is about to get very exciting," Sylvia says. "Scyelen, I am also going to need you to light the way."

"Um. Okay?"

Deep breath. "Edge Tracer!"

A gleaming metallic pink chakram circles into existence in her hand. She splits it into two identical rings of sharpness, and holds them at the ready. A push on her mana lights the bladed rims of the chakrams with a rippling white glow.

Sylvia cuts the skewing spell, and the inversion spell, and ramps the amplification spell up to dangerous levels.

There is no sense of acceleration, but the goo vehicle abruptly plummets, screaming down into the former lake.

The vast cavern of the lair passes by, once... twice, thrice, and more, accelerating as they pick up more and more speed, wind resistance tearing at the outside of the vehicle.

And then...

It gets dimmer, first. And it seems to take longer to complete the loop through the cavern, even though they're moving faster than ever. It's like they're shinking, or like the cavern is expanding outwards around them. The air gets thinner as the walls of the cavern grow more and more distant, allowing them to pick up even more speed.

Soon, the cavern is nothing but distant shadows, and the edges of the lake-hole are too far away to see as they pass through at what seems like a crawl.

The Scintilla on the outside of the shell watches in fascination.

Abruptly, out of the darkness, come walls of gray stone, screaming by at a terrifying speed. They're in a tube of lunar rock, a tube that is rapidly shrinking.

"We're at the top!" Sylvia calls. "Scye-"

Scyelen doesn't wait for instructions.

She can see exactly what she needs to do, and she has exactly the tools to do it.

Folding her body back to brace herself against the goo, she hurls both chakrams out ahead of them. The blazing discs arc out to either side, closing in on the walls of rock as the walls of rock close in on then.

Scyelen activates her Barrage module.

Hands slam together, a ring of prismatic light forming around her fingers. She pulls her hands apart, the ring rotates and expands. Push. Lines sprout from the ring, new rings form, and the rings of aurora extend down the invisible connection between her and her weapons.

Planar Shear. The Stone Mage's spell. Scyelen waits, waits waits, the light from her discs sharpening against the rock as the distance closes, hand on the first ring of her Barrage

impact

and Scyelen casts with all her might as her chakrams explode, rock flashing over into plasma as she loses the discs... but not before her Barrage's charge lances out and shreds the rock around them just as the tunnel snaps down and meets hypersonic goo.

Scyelen is ripped from her hand-and-foot-holds, loses her grip on Sylvia, tumbling, air rips itself out of her lungs, nothing but absence to replace it.

Stars... and a gleaming blue marble.

Black wings snap outward from Scintilla's back; they come apart fluidly, moving almost more like smoke than any solid material, into twisting strands that reach for Scyelen, catch her, and pull her back in.

(The shell holds up against the rock even better than Scintilla was expecting; she only has to clear a little bit of moon gravel out of the layer of liquid goo in between her inner and outer shells. Well, maybe a moderate amount of moon gravel. But none of it penetrated farther than the surface of that middle layer.)

Scyelen flails and clings to Scintilla, gasping as she tries to breathe the nothingness.